Matthew Brown wrote:
What is lacking, IMO, are good articles on a lot of general but non-contentious topics. It's a lot easier to write an article on a very specialised topic than a general one. The specialized topic is likely to be well-bounded and of obvious and simple scope. Sources for such articles are generally easier to find (because they are so specific, they're easy to search for) and not contentious. It's a lot harder to find authoritative sources for general information, ironically, even though it's easy to find non-authoritative ones.
Partly I think it's because this is a greater-than-Wikipedia problem. We're good at summarizing consensus knowledge, but "how to best provide a general overview of a field" is frequently something about which no consensus exists outside Wikipedia. There are usually a few major textbooks, survey articles, etc. (sometimes many more than a few), often with significantly different approaches and decisions about what should be covered at the top-level and how. I know in my field the most popular textbook is also one of the most resented and criticized!
In more specific articles we deal with this by basically summarizing all the major views/approaches/etc., but doing that in a top-level article defeats the purpose of making it a readable introduction. In a handful of cases we can split them into separate articles, like "the [x school] view on [y]", which is a little easier to find a consensus about.
-Mark